"Totally coup, yo."

The truffle, that common confection composed almost entirely of chocolate and butter, is the perfect food for the depressed and suicidal.

Chocolate, wise men tell us, contains chemicals that mimic those found in the human body when in love, and produce that oceanic feeling of warmth, communion, and euphoria, making it perfect for the depressed. Additionally, if one consumes truffles in sufficient quantity, the fats contained within them will silently and effectively coat the arteries and clot the blood, leading to a certain and nearly painless death; hence, perfect for the suicidal.

Other wise men have warned us repeatedly that pumping carbon out of the ground and into the atmosphere will eventually make for a dead or dying planet. Furthermore, we have had the technology to mitigate this situation for at least fifty years, but have not utilized it. From these facts, one can only conclude that humankind wishes to exterminate itself and nearly all other life from the planet. The reason for this remains a mystery.

The most recent evidence of this occurred in October of 2001, when one country, attacked by agents of uncertain origin, automatically and reflexively began bombing an arguably arbitrary area of ground where, close by, a lot more carbon can be found. Humankind will not pause to think when carbon is involved; not the men, women, and children who give their lives for it; certainly not those who bathe in it.

For at least 100,000 years now, men have been throwing rocks at each other, and the only thing that has changed has been the size of the rocks. We have traded punches and insults for a thousand centuries waiting for peace to break out. Should you find yourself curious as to the solution to this particular riddle, all you need do is find a four- or five-year-old child, and ask him or her, “What do you do when you’ve tried something over and over – and it just doesn’t work?” In addition, ask the child if he or she thinks that God, any god, under any circumstances, or for any reason, wants us to incinerate each other on such a regular basis for such trivial reasons.

What we need is a new solution to our problem, since all this fighting hasn’t done the trick, and getting shot really hurts.

The Truffle Solution: Converting the world’s yearly military budget and subsidiary (Black Budget) industries to the manufacture and distribution of truffles would yield (give or take a truffle) one trillion truffles – about two hundred billion pounds – for the world’s 6 billion inhabitants. This works out to about 3,300 pounds per person. Though this at first might seem like overkill – so to speak – we want to be sure.If mankind chooses “Death by Chocolate” (it had to be said) over destruction by means nuclear or conventional, or the sustained death of ecological collapse, we could all be dead in, say, two years.

The Truffle Solution has several advantages over war and ecological collapse, among them:

1. It tastes better.

2. Many of the animal species that mankind would have otherwise obliterated will be spared; many would even benefit by feasting on our engorged corpses.

3. All of the 15,000 children around the world, each day – every day, who clutch their starving stomachs before crying themselves to sleep for their last night on earth, will at last have something to eat.Some might argue that to give precious truffles to the poor and dying is foolhardy, or might render them indolent.Let me reassure you – at last, there will be plenty for all.

4. We will save future generations from a horrible death by suffocating in the poisoned air.Since they will never have existed, they will not be able to curse us as they die; this knowledge should be a real comfort to whatever remains of our collective conscience.

Certainly one can find advantages in methods of ridding the planet of humankind other than The Truffle Solution. To the pathologically wealthy, and those who still embrace the concept of the Zero Sum Game, whereby it is not sufficient for one to win, someone else must lose; ecological collapse offers their progeny the cold comfort that they will be the last to die.

Surprisingly, even the fast, hot death of global thermonuclear war has a bright side.For a hundred or so years, humankind will have broadcast a message to the stars, via television and radio, ending in an abrupt broad-spectrum electro-magnetic pulse (Here we were!), on how not to conduct a planetary civilization – then silence. Who knows? The ashes of Man might fertilize a million viable civilizations, comprised of aliens who never got to see the last episode of “Friends.”

One final note: If we do not adopt The Truffle Solution, the author hopes we still have the grace to go to our children, and tell them that our collective suicide was not their fault. Say that we were too busy paying the mortgage and burning carbon to investigate for ourselves if what the wise men were telling us was correct, or if those who lead us, in trying to control the minds of other men, might have somehow lost their own.

Now – do you think that the argument is simplistic or that the solution to the problem is simplistic?

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